People say that there's never been a more viciously partisan American populace. People don't know history. As early as 1800, John Adams' followers were calling Jefferson "a mulatto"; Jefferson's agents, in return, said that Adams was "hermaphroditical."

Makes our attack ads seem almost genteel, doesn't it?

Still, even if Americans have always fought over politics, they used to do it with a little more wit and a lot more intelligence, as the new documentary "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" ably proves.

Born in 1925 into an old political family, raised mostly in Washington and later related (through step-families and marriage) to the Kennedys, Vidal had an insider's view of America's elite.

Yet he chose the life of an outsider, skewering Democrats and Republicans, living most of the year in Italy, returning chiefly to write movies, preside over book tours or occasionally, quixotically, run for office.

His politics were unabashedly radical ("In this country, we have socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for the poor"). His immunity to myth was legendary (he kept a photo of JFK on his wall, he said, only to remind himself to never again succumb to charm).

"Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" is a fond, even familial salute to the man (his nephew, filmmaker Burr Steers, is one of the producers). Like the man itself, it's flawed, funny, a little long-winded and rather biased.

Also, often fascinating.

Admitted, it misses the mark when it comes to Vidal's fiction and drama; it's harder, perhaps, to make a movie about prose than about politics, but there's no hint here of how brilliantly his historical novels were researched (or how screamingly funny "Myra Breckenridge" could be).

But it does a great job of collecting Vidal's Wildean aphorisms on class, democracy and liberty. And the film comes alive when it gets to his justly famous live-TV debates with William F. Buckley in '68, when Vidal called the conservative a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley called him "you queer" (and also threatened to punch him in the face).

It was a precursor, perhaps, to today's media shoutfests, but it's also a sign of how far we've fallen, both in range of accepted opinion (Vidal was a staunch leftist, not some triangulating liberal) and height of Ivy League erudition (the proudly patrician Buckley dumbed down his politics for no one, and would have seen no slur in the word "elitist").

"Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" has its own willful failures of memory. It doesn't detail all the libel suits that arose from the Buckley/Vidal feud, nor dig into Vidal's ability to hold a grudge (or explore the charges of anti-Semitism occasionally made against him).

And it can't explain Vidal's complicated sexuality, which idealized friendship, enjoyed sex (chiefly with men), but thought romantic love was a fiction. (Although Vidal lived with, and was buried next to, his long-time male companion, he swore the two of them weren't lovers — the secret of their happiness.)

But what this documentary does do, wonderfully, is remind us that, no, bitter arguments and loud controversies are not a new part of our political process. And that intelligent debate and dazzling wit seem to be, sadly, quite old-fashioned ones.

Ratings note: The film contains strong language.

'Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia' (Unrated) IFC (83 min.)
Directed by Nicholas Wrathall. Now playing in New York.